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Tokimeki Memorial Music Video Clips: Impressions

Well it's certainly the best part of the game although it doesn't have a great deal of competition. Only 3 mini games does not a mini game collection make. To be fair the game was never advertised as a mini game collection but as an optimist I hoped for the best ie.loads of games, not three. But read on, it's not all bad.

When you start up you select from one of five SD girls to play as. Each girl appears to have several unlockable endings which piece together to make one big complete ending, although I've not unlocked anything yet. Once selected your girl spins a wheel of fortune made up of 6 segments. 3 segments give you extra points, the other 3 take points away from you before the games have even begun!

In order to unlock an ending you have to score above a set number of points over the course of the 3 mini games. The wheel of fortune adds a little randomness into the difficulty and I assume that each subsequent ending will require a greater number of points to be scored, which would add some replay to a game that initially seems quite shallow.

Now onto the games. First up is the Lion Jump which pays homage to the great Circus Charlie and is the reason I bought this game in the first place. Whist CCs Lion game simply had you jumping your lion through hoops and over fires TMM:MVCs lion game ups the complexity a touch. Now you have to control the lion, the girl and the girls sidekick (the sunburnt pokemon thing in the Tommy Cooper hat and bow tie on the front of the box) all at the same time.

Most of the flaming hoops you have to jump through are laid out in such a way that in order to pass through the highest of the hoops (usually the ones containing the high scoring gold coins) you first have to get the lion to jump through its hoop, before the lion passes through its hoop you have to jump the girl from the lions back through her hoop, and as she's jumping from the lion you have to get the hampster thing to jump from the girls head through the final hoop.

Mess it up and you have to either run back to pick your partners up to try again or you can run past the jump you just failed and wait for your partners to catch up with you. Either way you're losing time and losing points. The jumps follow different patterns ie. sometimes only one of the characters needs to jump, sometimes two of them do, other times all of them and there are coins and time bonuses to grab along the way as well.

Next up is the Juggling game. You start off with one ball which you can throw from one hand to the other via the L2 and R2 buttons. Whenever you press the circle button the hamster will throw you another ball. I'm usually pretty well co-ordinated but only managed to get a maximum of 4 balls into the mix before I lost it. In the demo play the crowd only begins to cheer (a sign that you're going well) once the girl's juggling about 10 balls. Some practise is definitely called for.

The final game is the High Wire. Compared to the 2 other games which are quick and challenging this is a bit of a let down. All you need to do is walk the length of the high wire whislt keeping your balance. This is done by tapping left or right to keep your girl upright, tapping down to get her to move forward and pressing circle to get the hamster to jump up and collect the bannanas that are floating on either side of the wire.

My main gripe with this game is that the hampster automatically runs to where the items are. All you need to do is to make it jump at the right time (easy). If you had to control the hamster via the L2/R2 buttons as well as having to control the girl at the same time it would have made the game a bit more worthwhile. This may happen once you start to unlock some of the videos as I assume the difficulty level for each game will need to be upped to make later videos a bit harder to unlock but I can't say for sure yet.

Once all 3 games are finished your score is added up. If you scored above a set number of points you get a Video unlocked. If you score just under the required level to get a video the game lets you spin the wheel of fortune again to try to make the difference up. If all goes well then you should be sitting back to watch your newly unlocked bit of Tokimeki Video.

Would I recommend this game? Realistically no, unless you're a huge Tokimeki fan.

My criteria for buying this game was that it was a virtually unknown game by Konami, which appeared to be paying homage to Circus Charlie, that was clearly labeled as an action game. It was never a full price release in Japan and I got mine sealed for sub £20. I'll be able to get my moneys worth out of it as I've yet to see what any of the videos are like and the first 2 games are of the 'look easy but aren't' variety.

Hopefully the game will evolve a bit the further into you get ie. the games themselves get harder rather than just raising the number of points you need to score to unlock the next clip. Whether this is the case or not, only time will tell.
[thumbnail]http://allsoft.scei.co.jp/jacket/l/slpm65118b.jpg[/thumbnail]

Originally posted by 05pro
My criteria for buying this game was that it was a virtually unknown game by Konami, which appeared to be paying homage to Circus Charlie, that was clearly labeled as an action game.

It sounds from your review that you're not particularly a TokiMemo fan (I'm rather an anti-fan myself), but I thought that since most? people reading this would be interested in TokiMemo in some way, the impressions would have benefitted from a list of videos (song and maybe character singing).

I think it mentions it on the back cover, but the image is too small for me to make it out.

Originally posted by xS
Has anyone played the other games? What do they play like?

The real TokiMemo games are stat balancers.

Basically, the game is all menus, and is more of a life-sim, but the focus is definitely in being a date-sim.

The setup is you play through the life of a high schooler. There is a tree at your highschool. Legend has it that if you confess your love underneath the tree, your love will last forever. So you have a 3 year timeline (HS in Japan is grade 10-12) to have a girl confess her love to you there. The game will always end after 3 years.

Well, I mentioned that it's a menu-driven game. You can do things 3 times a week: 5-day weekday block, Saturday, Sunday. What kinds of things can you do? You can study science, humanities or art. You can do sports. You can work on your physical appearance. You can just have fun. And you can rest. Each of these actions will raise certain stats and will lower others. So you have to balance yourself right, or at least know what you're aiming for. If you work on nothing but beauty, I'm sure you'll start failing your exams. Remember that whatever you choose for your 5-day weekday block will be emphasized because you'll be doing that action 5x that week.

In addition to what you choose to do, you're structured in a life of a Japanese high-schooler. You will have holidays, which generally operate like weekends. You will have New Years, where you can ask someone to accompany you to the shrine. You will have Christmas, where you may be invited to parties. You will have midterms and finals. You will have school festivals where you can participate in something (some minigames like Twinbee Time Attack are accesable through this). You will have school field trips where you may fight a couple Final Fantasy style battles.

But I'm leaving out the most important part. This is all for the girls. You will meet girls in the game depending on what you do. For instance, you will never meet one of the girls until your Appearance statistic is very high. Others you may need to join a certain club to meet. Once you meet a girl, you may randomly bump into them and typical Japanese adventure dialog takes place where you may be given choices. Select the right one and the girl may like you more. Once you acquire a girl's phone number, you are able to call them up and ask for a date. You get to choose the date and location, and if they're available... and if they want to do so, they'll accept. Dates will also typically have some dialog where you must choose the appropriate responses. Remember that everything is based on the tastes of the girl. If a girl likes classical music, and you take her to watch a rock concert, that may not go well with her. If the girl hates sissy types, and you tell her you need her, she may not be happy.

You can find out the interests of the girls in various ways. Sometimes you discover it by taking them to dates. Other times, your best friend may know, and you can call him instead of a girl to see if he knows any thing about the girls, and also check the status of what the girls think about you.

One crucial aspect of Tokimemo is that if a girl does not like you, a bomb icon will appear when you check on their emotion status. Remember that all status drops over time, so you must continue to be in contact with the girls once you've met them. If a bomb is left alone, eventually it will explode and it will drop the opinions of all the girls toward you. It would be akin to you burning a girl, and the girl gossips to everyone about you. So you do not want bombs to drop. Not to mention, a bomb that goes off means that there will likely be other bombs to appear once the other opinions drop, starting a chain reaction.

So that's the game in a big nutshell. There's a lot more things like checking a newspaper to see what kind of seasonal events there are (ie new date locations, or what movie is playing, or what kinds of concerts are around).

TokiMemo 2 is exactly the same as above with different girls, but also includes a childhood section in the beginning. So what you do in childhood affects what happens when you jump to the main high-school portion.

TokiMemo 3 is similar to the first, but adds a ton of options. There is now also a "hobbies" section where you can spend your time on anime, on video games, on learning to bake cookies, etc. You also have fine control over what you can wear for outfits on dates and such. The life-sim portion is really expanded upon in this game.

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Now why I personally hate the game is due to the lack of personality and characters. The girls are zombies, and are composed of nothing more than a list of likes and dislikes. Compare this to a "Dramatic Adventure game" like Sakura Taisen, or a love sim like Sentimental Graffiti where every character has their own dreams, their own ambitions, their own pasts that brought them to where they are now.

The feeling I get from TokiMemo is emptiness, and it really is the epitome of the word "date-sim". Most of these styles of games are not "date-sims", but TokiMemo sort of is that. The girls are hollow. There is no sense of caring about them because there's nothing to care about. I'm not saying you should fall in love with a video game character. But you should be able to identify, relate with, and sympathize with characters, as if they were real.

I also don't find stat-balancing games to be good gameplay either. It's rather unexciting, and ends up being like basic arithmetic with a luck factor thrown in.

But the major factor is that it's not a character-driven game at all. It's a stats management-driven game, and the girls seem to be secondary... or tertiary or...

Tsubaki: The Tokimeki games mean nothing to me per se. I've never played any of their dating sim style games and probably never will. Konami are basically using their established series to sell a game that couldn't stand on its own due to its limited nature. They could have easily based this game around any of their other current franchises (Goemon, Mini Moni etc) but I imagine they chose Tokimeki as it's historically proved to be a big seller in Japan.

I'd have listed the songs, etc but my Japanese isn't up to much.

If you're a fan of the series you'll get your moneys worth out of the game but if you're not you'd be much better buying the more substansial Bishi Bashi games or Mini Moni Dice de Pyon if it's Konami mini-games you want.

I highly doubt it's called "Tokimeki Memorial Music Video Clips" , but that's subject to assumption, since you never bother to mention the name of the game at all in your impressions. Threads will be edited for length in accordance with the "reader review" guidelines.

It certainly wasn't edited to misrepresent the post in anyway. Please provide the official title of the import and it will be updated.

Originally posted by bahn
I highly doubt it's called "Tokimeki Memorial Music Video Clips" , but that's subject to assumption, since you never bother to mention the name of the game at all in your impressions.

You might want to check the picture of the box provided in the original post which displays the name of the game in English.

Thanks for the impressions, 05pro. A Circus Charlie tribute, eh? I'd give it a look if only I had a JPS2.

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is always right. -Learned Hand